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Malcolm Gladwell at Pubcon
Lee Odden does a fine job keeping up with the wisdom offered forth by Malcolm Gladwell at the Boston Webmasterworld Pubcon.
Males Are the Predominate RSS Users
The Media 2.0 blog breaks down a bunch of really interesting statistics from the latest AdAge Interactive Fact Pack (PDF):
Feedburner: Podcasts Growing at 15% a Month
In a report on podcasting, RSS feed management company FeedBurner say that their service is now managing just under 45,000 podcast feeds.
Cashing in on Online Maps
Forbes magazine has taken a look at who's cashing in on online mapping services (mashups).
State of the Blogosphere
Dave Sifry has posted his quarterly State of the Blogosphere with these results including the observation that technology product launches attract a significant amount of interest:
Blogosphere Continues to Grow
David Sifry updates his "State of the Blogosphere" with new numbers on the growth of blogging.
Blogs Leap To 35.3 Million Online
Technorati's David Sifry released his latest State of the Blogosphere assessment, and found that his blog search engine now tracks over 35 million blogs. That's a lot of baby pictures and political rants being posted online.
65 million hit Internet map sites - Top 10 Map Sites
Some interesting numbers out of Internet research thinktank, ComScore media metrix ...
The Social Media Billing Gap
So my earlier post on the social media services gap kicked up some discussion, and as always, that's a good thing, right, but I purposely left something out of that post that's worth touching on now, even if consensus is still lacking -- that's billing.
Gmail For Domains Reviewed
Devin switched his site's email over to Gmail For Domains, and he's written up a review, complete with screenshots.
Google Undermining Christians?
Would you expect Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra to include not attacking a major religious group?
The State of Online Feed Readers - An Addendum
My pappy used to say, "You've got to crawl before you can walk." Ok, I don't have a pappy, I have a Dad. Truth be told, he never used to tell me that.
BlogBurst Ready to Start Newspaper Syndication
eWeek reports that BlogBurst will launch on Tuesday and syndicate more than 600 bloggers to traditional newspaper publishers.
CGM in the News
Consumer Generated Media (CGM) has been in the news the last couple days. Two items in particular caught my attention.
PodBop: Will Accelerate Podcasting's Uptake
Two things will accelerate the uptake of podcasting. One is ease of use. The other is innovative podcasts to which people will want to subscribe.
IABC Launches Conference Podcast and Blog
For the IABC 2006 international conference in Vancouver, Canada, in June, Shel and I are co-hosting and producing ConferenceCast, the official podcasts of the conference, as we announced in February.
Facebook + (No PR) = Car Crash
Facebook
is an interesting phenomenon. It's a college-only social
network -- oh, wait, college (but no junior colleges,
and still some ignored colleges) and select high schools
and some 8th grades -- that is supposed to connect college
students that are on the same campus, and then extend
that to other friends...
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04.19.06
Agony Of The Blog Stars
 By
David A. Utter
When one is a high-profile blogger, and an employee of a prominent Internet presence, sometimes the prospect of posting an entry can cause some personal misgivings.
Editor's Note: If some of you up-and-coming bloggers ever wondered how some of the most notable names in the Internet industry (or the other half) live when it comes to blogging, check out what Dave and Mike offer and tell us what you think at WebProWorld.
At PubCon's wake-up round table, Morning Coffee Session with The Super Bloggers Of Search, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny, Google's Matt Cutts, and Microsoft's Robert Scoble each noted how hitting the post button is not always as easy as it looks; Mike McDonald sent along some of their quotes on trepidation and blogging.
The topic of Google Finance came up, in reference to a post Zawodny made about the competitor's product:
"When Google finance launched a lot of people kept asking me what I thought about it. What I had to say wasn't really nice, but it was something people wanted to hear me comment on it so I wrote it up. I'd mentioned that in some regards it had reminded me of some of the shortcomings that Yahoo finance suffered from in its earlier days.
"It was one of those things where I'm sitting there wondering - eehh do I click the publish buttton or not?
"What resulted was I ended up in a meeting with the manager of Yahoo Finance. She had read what I wrote, and that was the reason she wanted to get together and talk about some things they had coming up."
To Cutts, being out there is important:
"You have to be out there because every day somebody will throw some mud at you, and you have to be out there to deal with it."
Scoble pointed out how the pace of news being spread happens at blinding speed:
"If somebody comes up with a new idea or a new story or virus or something like that, these things get covered so much faster now than they did before blogs."
For all of these notables, corporate culture has some rules in place with regards to blogging about the entity that signs their paychecks. Zawodny said at Yahoo guidelines have been published, but the business pace of getting things done did prove troublesome once:
"We have things like you cannot disclose trade secrets; a lot of it is a reminder or repeat of the confidentiality policy and so on. 'If you're planning to write about work in your blog we would appreciate you letting you boss know', but that's not the same as saying that blogs require approval. There's a big difference. It's a pretty simple policy and it's available online.
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"We once had a story that was going up on the Y!Search Blog and things typically go through a few people before we put it up. I was telling them 'we need to get this up soon.' At noon it still wasn't up, so I just posted it on my own blog. I got 'the call' shortly thereafter, and I just told them it just took too long for them to respond."
Google managed to make Mark Jen famous by firing him over his blogging only a couple of weeks after he started working at the company. Cutts remarked on that and Google's blogging policy in general:
"Google has a blogging policy and its a bit more involved than just be smart. It's a couple of pages long. Obviously we avoid things like blogging about financial data and internal information.
"The whole situation with (the guy that got fired) probably set Google back 6 months in terms of starting into blogging, but we've come a long way since then and things have really moved along.
"It was not an auspicious beginning to blogging at Google, but it's turned out ok."
'Be smart' applies all the time, to any of the corporate bloggers. For Scoble it's a guiding principle:
"We have one policy and that's be smart. The PR people would probably rephrase that as don't be stupid. You have to be professional and just be smart about it.
"One thing about it is the speed of things there just isn't a lot of time for a big approval process, issues move too fast for that."
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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